Forest fires in February are in the news again.

To put the issue in a wider perspective Dr Johann Goldammer, Director of the Global Fire Monitoring Center (GFMC), Fire Ecology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Freiburg, Germany has kindly sent this annotated list of informative websites:

We are focusing on publishing/mirroring news from policies and politics, and the developments influencing fire or being influenced by fire, always lagging behind because it is enormously time-consuming to select online reports (out of around 100 per day) and finally mirroring them in the online archive. Thus, 2021 is not yet there:

The GWFN is working now through 8 Regional Centers (3 of them not yet online):

The SE Asia Center indeed is very much focusing on the equatorial region and problems:

The Thailand based “Upper ASEAN Region” is covered by a dedicated Research Unit:

Reducing excessive use of fire in land use and land-use change is the focus everywhere, including replacing harmful agricultural burning with alternative methods of biomass use, disposal or soil incorporation.

Vietnam is struggling, the latest evidence is the “Directive – Strengthening state management measure on burning of rice straw, crop by-products and other wastes to minimise negative impacts on the city environment”:

See also here:

The realization/law enforcement in Vietnam, like in Thailand and the rest of the developing world, including countries in transition, is not easy.

We think that the culture of addressing landscape fires and landscape fire management in a more holistic way is evolving, see the outcomes of IWFC-7, Campo Grande, Brazil, 2019:

Best to Chiang Mai
Johann